


White Picket

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s03e16 No Rest for the Wicked, Gen, Grave-Digging, Grief/Mourning, POV Sam Winchester, Season 3 Finale, Season/Series 03, crime scene clean-up, immateriality of death, life after death, materiality of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-02
Updated: 2010-05-02
Packaged: 2018-04-08 12:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4304631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam spends his twenty-fifth birthday in New Harmony, Indiana.  The only thing worse than dying on your birthday is being forcibly reminded that last year, you did (and it had consequences).</p><p>Coda to 3x16 "No West for the Wicked."</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Picket

Sam spends his twenty-fifth birthday in New Harmony, Indiana. He's not anyone special, and it's not his special day.

He has just lost his brother to a vicious dog mauling in an otherwise charmingly pristine gated community. He's not pressing charges; doesn't matter. 

The police tell him he should have more faith in the justice system.

And Sam actually laughs. Maybe this is justice after all. He'd wanted a normal life--Division soccer, Key Club, American History; and then Maples Pavilion, Jess, a room that's actually his for longer than four months; and then... He doesn't know. Just _out_. 

Death had changed that, changed _everything_ , not because the experience was particuarly profound (brownie points for the Athesists--he doesn't remember anything at all. No God, no Heaven, not even limbo), but because he'd come back. He was twenty-four, he was zero, and in one year his brother would not be twenty-nine: He'd be dead.

Hunters talk about supernatural deaths--death by ghost-touch, by rawhead, by _invisible dogs, jaws like mastiffs and claws like nothing this side of Hell_ \--but in the end, it's just death.

It's not seeing the light go out of someone's eyes. It's blinking, and missing it.

It's not hearing their last breaths. It's trying so hard to stifle your own you don't notice theirs go.

And it's not the blood, spilling out and all over and pooling at your brother's (body's) neck, the raw mess left of his torso, the _rigor mortis_ in the crooks of his arms. It's being told that you can't help clean your brother off the floor, because you don't have trauma waste management training.

Trauma waste management training. He doesn't have _trauma waste management_ training. Of course he doesn't; he's just a normal civilian, after all. 

Sam is a civilian and his brother is dead and he finds that grief doesn't change, no matter who you are. Just changes whom you're grieving.

He remembers losing Jess. Guilt, mostly. Guilt and nightmares. _Shouldn't have deluded myself into thinking I wouldn't fuck that up. I'm sorry, Jessica Lee. I am so sorry._

He remembers losing Dad. Regret, almost entirely. In spite of the hard-line resentment he appropriated, Sam had envisioned their reconciliation a hundred ways. Weeping his way through the back-end of his last dose of Vicodin and kissing ash hadn't been one.

 

_Did he say anything to you?_

 

He will never forget losing Dean. It is everything and nothing. It is driving a little too fast and drinking a little too much, being a little too _Dean_ when he drives and drives and finally finds a private property too bleak to be investigated.

You can't put a body in the ground, soil to flesh. Biohazard, maybe. Legal deterrent against hastily concealed murders, definitely. But Sam can't burn him, and he won't embalm, so into the ground Dean goes, wrapped in some old shroud that's so greased and oiled he thinks even Dean might object.

But that's the thing.

He can't.

Never again. And with all Sam knows of ghosts and crossroads and hexes and exorcisms and a hundred other death-cheating mechanisms, there's nothing he can do.

So instead Sam orders a Cobb salad and a bacon cheeseburger at the traditional Winchester roadside diner, dinner for two. He eats both, because he hasn't eaten since--

 

\-- _Bobby, if this is my Last Supper, you could at least break out the good stuff. Your whiskey tastes like piss._

\-- _I ain't gonna serve anyone up a last supper 'less they're already writhing on the carpet, need it spoon-fed. Any sooner's too soon. And boy, you don't like my fare, there's plenty of water in the tap. You wouldn't know_ 'good' _if it slapped you in the face._

 

\--And Dean brushes his knuckles against his face reflexively, turns it into an exaggerated stretch. _You may be on to something, Bobby._

 

Since Sam just dug a four-foot trench (then he hits clay; he doesn't know how the trees grow here. Sorry, Dean. Four feet under.), he's justified in eating both.

Girl a few booths over's talking about her sister. Ruptured appendix; something inside just snapped and claimed her, just like that. She doesn't know what to do. Angry at the doctor, but mostly just gone.

Sam agrees, because he's no one special. It's just death, and he just has to deal with it.

He flips out his ID when he orders his first beer and the waiter grins. "Buddy, I wouldnta carded you. But hey, happy birthday. Gonna do anything special with your folks?"

"Already did," Sam replies. He has dirt under his nails and blood under his jacket, because he couldn't bring himself to change his shirt. "Already did."


End file.
